Tesla Says Autopilot Makes Its Cars Safer. Crash Victims Say It Kills
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The article says no such thing.
You could just as easily interpret the events as: "He put on his turn signal, which Autopilot ignored."
A human driver should have been driving defensively and realized they needed to give the person space.
A human driver usually would have hit the brake as soon as they saw a turn signal.
"Driving defensively" doesn't mean "give them the right of way". It means that if they put on the blinker, they're probably thinking of changing lanes even though it may not be safe to do so (and don't have the right of way).
It's the type of situation where it's better to be safe than right.
If you change lanes on a freeway, and a vehicle is coming up behind you at normal freeway speeds, the only way for you to be surprised by it is if you didn't properly check for traffic.
> You could just as easily interpret the events as: "He put on his turn signal, which Autopilot ignored."
It's both. He didn't check properly and Autopilot ignored the turn signal.
> A human driver should have been driving defensively and realized they needed to give the person space.
I suppose, but if you're in a crash and your argument is that the other driver should have been defensive then you're basically admitting you caused it. (in situations with two drivers and no mechanical failure)
> A human driver usually would have hit the brake as soon as they saw a turn signal.
"Usually" I'd agree is true, but lots of drivers would expect to pass and then let them change lanes behind.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
Not slowing down for the signal is bad behavior but I don't know if you're obligated to slow down for a signal and it's not really a driving speed issue. Someone signalling isn't a road condition.
Also, a driver on the freeway continuing to go the same speed should not be "VERY surprising"!
On the other hand the Tesla probably shouldn't have been going that fast when the speeds of cars in both adjacent lanes are going that much slower. I'd expect a human driver would typically feel more wary in such a situation, wary for that exact situation of a truck changing lanes.
To the layman, autopilot and self-driving are synonymous (as epitomised by this scene from The Darwin Awards: https://youtu.be/PNF7Ru1mMeo)
Aircraft don't often cluster together meters apart and travel in the same directions. If they did, Autopilot would certainly be used differently. This is why I think it is irresponsible to use the term for automobiles.
In my opinion, this is yet another case of people being lulled into a false sense of security that the car drives itself, when in reality the Tesla's driver should have been attentive and should have reacted.
"The police faulted the Tesla driver — not the car — for his inattention and his driving at an unsafe speed"
Doesn't sound like "forced to change lanes" to me.
In every similar story I always fail to imagine how the driver can possibly stay in a state of "active attention" 100% of the time, while also not doing anything active. That's not how much of the human race works.
At this point it's a lot easier to just actively drive, instead of having to make a sudden split-second decision while being dulled by the inaction. I feel like non full-autonomous driving just doesn't make sense at all.
But then the human won't be reacting fast enough when he is needed to handle an unforeseen problem, so they're kept in the loop and active, just in case.
Also, I could imagine that an airplane is, from a totally theoretical and simplicistic point of view, much easier to manage for a computer, even for simply having a lot of space to maneuver, and knowing constantly what other airplanes are doing.
But driving a car? How can a computer possibily handle a scenario where edge-cases make for a good 85% of each travel, unless you drive in the desert?
Maybe we should just agree that auto-pilot, in its common interpretation, is currently just a sci-fi concept, and communicate more honestly what a computer inside a car can't and can do.
Apparently, dodging weird obstacles is something it struggles with. Which is a problem, since all driving is, essentially, dodging weird obstacles.
I've never driven a Tesla, but I've seen a similar thing in a Citroën I rented once. On the highway, with cruise control, the car could practically drive itself. It would follow the lane, slow down if cars in front got too close, accelerate back to the set speed when they went away, etc.
Once or twice I completely lifted the hands off the wheel, and pretty quickly it would start complaining. So with this system, the driver actually had to be engaged.
It never said he changed lanes without checking for traffic. And the police put the blame squarely on the Tesla driver.
Are those countries that also don't let you stay in the left lane?
But even if it's illegal to pass on the right, it's still a terrible idea to change lanes to the right without looking behind you!
(Do vehicles already in a lane have right of way in the US, relative to vehicles who might cross into that lane from another?)
California has a couple of laws [0] that mandate "reasonable or prudent" speed, e.g.
> No person shall drive a vehicle upon a highway at a speed greater than is reasonable or prudent having due regard for weather, visibility, the traffic on, and the surface and width of, the highway, and in no event at a speed which endangers the safety of persons or property.
The truck met the requirement [1] for signaling a change (100 feet beforehand). Is it "reasonable or prudent" for the Tesla driver to maintain speed (nevermind accelerate at the last second) with the truck slowly entering the lane? Especially with the left lane traffic having slowed down enough that, in the span of the 5 second clip, the Tesla is seen passing 2 cars on their right before hitting the truck?
[0] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
Here in Switzerland we are allowed to PASS traffic on the right hand side to (since Jan.01.2021). But you are NOT allowed to overtake, as in change lanes actively.
> The video saved by the car [the Tesla] Mr. Yalung was driving shows it passing vehicles on the right and left. Four seconds before impact, Mr. Maldonado turned on his blinker. It flashed four times while his Explorer was in its original lane. A fifth flash came as his truck was straddling the lanes. In court documents, Mr. Maldonado said he had noticed the Tesla approaching rapidly in his rearview mirror and tried to swerve back.
5 car lengths is less than a second at freeway speeds. By the time the truck started changing lanes, you can look at points on the ground moving and see that it was about a second ahead of the tesla. Changing lanes that close and without speeding up into the new lane was not safe, autopilot or not.
The car length in this context is just the length the car travels per second.
Is that how that term is used?
Either way, that truck was far under that suggested amount of space when it crossed into the tesla's lane. It was around one second, well under two let alone more. Measuring against the ground, of course, not relative speed.
At the speed limit, vehicles are going about 100 feet per second. At the start of the video they appear to be about 3 dashed lines apart (120ft?) and by the time the truck is about to switch lanes they're two dashed lines apart (80ft?)
Honestly the truck driver would have been better off not signalling, or changing lanes immediately upon signalling, because then there would have been much more space and they probably wouldn't have slowed down so much.
Anyway, autopilot is not to blame; if anything comes out of the lawsuit, it's that autopilot should not be called that because it lulls drivers into a false sense of security. In the end, the driver is still responsible and the family should put the blame on the driver. It really sounds like the family is holding Tesla responsible instead of the actual person responsible, the driver of the Tesla. But in a court, they might not win since the driver of the truck may have made an unexpected maneuver, and the death of the child may be blamed on the truck driver because he wasn't wearing a seatbelt.
In New Zealand the second quickest way to get a ticket is driving without a seat belt.
Yes, they are. The driver is responsible for ensuring all passengers under 16 years old are buckled in.
I recently watched a great talk by Andrej Karpathy about Teslas transition away from radar towards vehicle speed estimation using only vision: https://youtu.be/gZ2SeiLjaEc
I wonder if it would have prevented the tragic outcome here.
See specifically at 2:20:22 [2]:
> We use that radar to annotate what the vision is seeing, the bounding boxes that come out of the neural networks, so instead of human annotators telling you that this car, in this bounding box, is roughly 25 meters away, you can annotate that data much better using sensors.
I take that to mean that the radar is used as part of supervised learning for updating the model offline, whereas just the cameras are used as input to the model.
> In most of the video, the Tesla maintained a speed of 69 miles per hour, but just before impact it briefly increased to 70 m.p.h. then slowed in the final second, according to data from the car.
> Mr. Rajkumar of Carnegie Mellon, who reviewed the video and data at the request of The Times, said Autopilot might have failed to brake for the Explorer because the Tesla’s cameras were facing the sun or were confused by the truck ahead of the Explorer. The Tesla was also equipped with a radar sensor, but it appears not to have helped.
> “A radar would have detected the pickup truck, and it would have prevented the collision,” Mr. Rajkumar said in an email. “So the radar outputs were likely not being used.”
Radar throws a lot of false readings so there are many situations where it is ignored.
For examples, readings of stationary objects are mostly false.
My guess is that the speed difference was so big that also in this case Tesla decided that the radar reading was stationary and false.
I suspect its a vision or fusion problem--as the article points out, the lighting wasn't great.
Why doesn't the car use ultrasound for AEB? Perhaps risk of false positives coupled with the fact that its range is so short it would only have time for limited braking anyway?
You're either operating the vehicle or not. The hard part of daily driving is paying attention, not barely turning the wheel to change lanes. What is the purpose of the current autopilot?
But I'd lay long odds that both things are true: the Tesla autopilot does indeed make it's cars safer, and it also kills people. A similar thing can be said about vaccination: it kills people, while on average making them safer.
We've seen what a mess that situation has created for vaccines, driving the rise of the anti-vaxer movement. I wonder it we will see the rise of anti autopilot movement. Judging by some of the comments here, perhaps we already have.
Where I live if someone enters your lane and you hit them it is always their fault. You have right of way in your lane that is absolute - no one can cut you off.
So why is Tesla driver at fault?
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
> No person shall drive a vehicle upon a highway at a speed greater than is reasonable or prudent having due regard for weather, visibility, the traffic on, and the surface and width of, the highway, and in no event at a speed which endangers the safety of persons or property.
Maintaining the speed limit as another car gives 4 seconds of signaling and spends at least a full second in your lane is arguably not "reasonable".
Where you live, if someone makes a reasonable signal to move into my lane, and I decide to not brake and rear-end them — you're saying that would be an automatic payout in my favor?
Even if you have an obligation to brake and mitigate the problem, the fact that you have to brake sure sounds like they are the actual cause of the problem.